10. Silicon Valley: “Terms of Service” (season four, episode two, aired on 4/30/17) — A comedic highlight of the fourth season of Silicon Valley, and the show as a whole, was this brief, beautiful moment in which Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) ascended to CEO of PiperChat … and then flamed out spectacularly. Mr. Nanjiani has been a secret weapon on the show since the beginning, and he killed it in this spotlight episode. I loved watching the arrogant, drunk-with-power Dinesh, but the brilliant comedic beauty of the moment in which Dinesh realized how badly he had bungled things and just how far over his head he was, was astonishing. It was one of the funniest moments in any TV show all year long. (The continual pinging sound effect throughout the scene, as more and more under-age users sign up for PiperChat and Dinesh finds himself in deeper and deeper trouble, took a great scene and made it amazing. It’s a piece of comedic genius.) The entire ensemble was on fire in this episode. Throw in the welcome return of Matt McCoy’s sad-sack lawyer (“My shame will linger long after my voting rights are restored”) and a great final moment with series villain Gavin Belson as his triumph turns to ash (when he realizes the truth about PiperChat) and you have a winner of an episode. (Click here for my full review of Silicon Valley season four.)

9. Sherlock: “The Final Problem” (season four, episode three, aired on 1/15/17) — What just might be the final episode of Sherlock that we ever see (though I hope that’s not the case!) was one of the series’ darkest and most nail-bitingly intense. After a lot of teasing, this episode confirmed that the big bad villain of the season was the never-before-seen third Holmes sibling. Sian Brooke was terrific as the dangerous and insane Eurus Holmes. For the first time in the series, both Sherlock and Mycroft seemed truly outmatched. This episode wrought tremendous tension out of Eurus’ torturing of her brothers and John Watson, as she presented them with a series of increasingly impossible challenges. This was as grim as the show has ever gotten, as time and again our three heroes were powerless to stop innocent people from being murdered by Eurus all around them. I could hardly believe what I was watching. The show has never looked better — every aspect of the production seemed to be firing … [continued]

Josh Reviews Legion Season One

In much the same way that I never imagined a TV show based on the Coen Brothers’ magnificent film Fargo could possibly be any good, when I first read about Legion, a new TV show based on a minor character from the X-Men comics, I was not at all interested. I’ve been burned by many previous super-hero shows, and with the X-Men movie franchise floundering without much direction, this looked like a cheap way to cash in on the X-Men name. Well, Noah Hawley has proven me wrong twice now. I will never doubt him again. Just as Mr. Hawley’s reimagining of Fargo was an incredible success, so too has he created a rich, thrilling, wonderfully bizarre version of a super-hero show with Legion. I loved pretty much every minute of it.

Based on story-lines written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz in the X-Men spin-off comic book The New Mutants from the 1980s (as well as some key issues written by Mr. Claremont in the main Uncanny X-Men book), Legion tells the story of David Haller, a young mutant with incredible psychic powers whose apparent schizophrenia makes him an enormous danger to the people around him and perhaps the entire world. As the series begins, we see that David has been institutionalized, but he soon falls into the hands of a mysterious agency called Division Three. They suspect what David will soon learn, that what he has always thought were his deep psychological problems might be a manifestation of his incredible mutant abilities. David is rescued from Division Three by a group of fellow mutants, though neither they nor David realize that he had been hiding, deep within him, a powerful evil.

That brief plot description doesn’t begin to capture the head-spinning complex narrative that Mr. Hawley and his team have crafted, a joyously madcap journey through David’s past and present in which one can never be quite sure what is real and what is imaginary. The entire structure of Legion has been designed to put the audience right into the middle of David’s madness and his broken mind. Its fiendishly clever. Watching the show becomes an incredibly fun exercise in attempting to unravel the tangled of mystery of David’s past.

Every inch of Legion has been crafted with great care. The overall narrative, as I have just described, is an impressively clever piece of work. Beyond that, time and again the show delights in zigging when you would expect it to zag. We spend several episodes wondering about the mystery of Melanie (Jean Smart)’s frozen husband Oliver. When we finally meet him, or at least his astral projection, its in the instantly iconic, and very … [continued]

Late to the Party: Josh Reviews Fargo (The Series)

When I first read that Fargo, the wonderful Coen Brothers movie, was being adapted into a TV series, I was not remotely interested. Can you blame me? When is the last time a good movie was successfully turned into a TV show that was remotely worth one’s time? But then a funny thing happened. This show I had completely dismissed started getting positive review. Very positive reviews. As 2014 drew to a close, I started seeing FX’s Fargo TV show listed on Best TV of the Year lists. Again and again. Had I made a mistake in writing off this show? And so, at the very end of 2014, right before putting together my own Best TV of 2014 list, I watched the whole first season of Fargo.

I was not at first bowled over by the pilot episode. It was extremely well-made, gorgeously shot, and certainly filled with a wonderful ensemble of actors. But I was surprised that this was the same show about which I had read such effusive praise. I had two main problems with the pilot.

Number one, I wasn’t pleased by the way they seemed to take some of the iconic Fargo moments and characters and remove much of what, to me, had made them special. A famous shot in Fargo is when a sleeping Marge (Frances McDormand) is awoken early in the morning. We see Marge’s husband’s arm draped over her. One of my favorite aspects of the film Fargo is the beautiful relationship between Marge and her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch), which is a reverse of the standard movie-cop archetypes. It’s the woman who is the tough, smart cop, and the man who is in the stay-at-home, supportive role. But in the show, when we see that shot, it seems that we’re back to the usual archetype with it being the woman’s arm draped over a man: the police chief Vern Thurman (Shawn Doyle). How boring to take that great Fargo flip and to flip in back to the original cliche! Things got worse for me when we actually got to the Marge (Frances McDormand) character — in the TV show, the character is called Molly (and is played by Allison Tolman). In the film, we first meet Marge when she is investigating an abandoned car and a dead body that have been found by the side of the road. Marge is sharp and gets right to the important details. She is way ahead of all the other cops. In the show, we meet Molly in a similar way, but here, she makes some mistakes in her deductions and has to be corrected by the man, chief Thurman. I was surprised … [continued]